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Synagogues and churches held prayer services for students as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Discover Bank $18.5 million for illegal student lending practices. The bank must repay students $16 million, pay a $2.5 million civil penalty and reform its lending practices. The Bureau accused Discover of overstating the minimum amount due in billing statements, misrepresenting students' total interest payments and engaging in illegal debt collection practices.

Rain Forest Action Network announces in 2015 that public pressure has forced bank of America, PNC Bank of Pittsburgh and bank of Scotland to phase out loans to Montain Top Removal Coal Mining sites in mountainous areas of primarily W. Virginia and Kentucky as well as Northeastern Teneessee and South West Virginia. This area is headwaters to most of the rivers in the easternUSA including the Potomac.

UN negotiators struggle to find consensus on debt, trade and tax policies on the last day of scheduled negotiations before heads of state, business leaders and development organizations meet for the July Financing for Development (FfD) conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

"These meetings offer a rare opportunity to raise needed resources to confront extreme poverty," said Eric LeCompte, executive director of the religious development organization Jubilee USA Network. LeCompte was in New York for the negotiations. "More than a trillion dollars can be raised annually if we win policies that promote responsible lending and curb corruption and tax evasion."

The national congress in the U.S.A. is nearing a vote on the future of manthly food assistance to 47 million citizens who are eligible and who have paid taxes. The food stamp program was launched in the 1930's by President Franklin Roosevelt during the "great Depression". People are not eating caviar and steak and champagne and must apply every year. The card ids virtually impossible to counterfeit. Please get involved where you can. Thanx.

Severe aftershocks continue to terrorize Nepal which was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on Saturday. The rising death toll climbed beyond 3,000 people. Nepal is one of the least developed countries in the world, ranking 145th out of 187 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. According to the World Bank, Nepal owes $3.8 billion in debt to foreign lenders and spent $217 million repaying debt in 2013. Nepal owes approximately $1.5 billion each to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and $54 million to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It owes $133 million to Japan and $101 million to China.

The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”

• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”

"When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not speak out; As I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats, I did not speak out; I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; As I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; As I was not a Jew.When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out."- Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984

The European Union fined eight financial institutions a combined total of $2.3 billion over their alleged role in the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). The manipulation of LIBOR is one of the largest banking scandals of our time. According to the Economist, when the rate is manipulated, it affects payments for more than $800 trillion of financial instruments and 99 percent of all commercial products including mortgages, credit cards and pensions, as reported by CNN. Five other financial institutions, including Barclays, R.B.S. and UBS, have paid more than $3 billion combined to regulators in the United States, Britain and Switzerland over the manipulation of the LIBOR rate.